So there I am, at my craft table stamping away and I noticed that I kept flipping between three projects because I’d do a little something on one, then get stuck, go to another, get stuck, go to another, and get stuck again. So my table looks something like this now:

I have no clue what to do next on a couple of these and am waiting for inspiration to strike. I could be waiting a long, long time.

So, when you get stuck on a card or project, don’t beat yourself up. It happens to everyone. Just give yourself some time away from the thing you’re stuck on and return to it later. That’s what I pan to do at least.

I was doing some coloring in my copy of Lost Ocean and after doing a four color pencil gradient on a fish, I stood back and looked at it and thought, “Wow. That’s really good!” These moments of “Wow! I don’t suck!” don’t happen that often, so it’s good to share them when they do.

Today I was checking out the store Paper Tales in San Diego to see what kind of options this city has. I originally decided to go there as they had a blog post that they had gotten all of the new Lawn Fawn items and I wanted to see them in person rather than on-line so I headed on down there and took a quick trip around the store.

It’s a small but charming store with a lot of fun items in it including a lot of stamps from Lawn Fawn and Avery Elle and I chose a set to buy and went up to the counter to pay. The clerk picked up the set to get the price and said to me, “You were sent here to pick this up for someone, huh?”

I said, “Oh, heck no. This is mine!”

The woman grinned and said, “Oh, good! It’s so rare to see men who do this kind of thing!”

She is certainly not wrong. But it’s the assumption that a man in a stamp store isn’t shopping for himself that irritates me. I can’t even begin to count the times I’ve been to a rubber stamp convention and heard, “Attention, ladies!” when an announcement was made. It’s a minor annoyance and one I’m loathe to make any fuss over; men have certainly excluded women over and over. So I usually just shrug and go about my stamp buying business.

So the clerk and I had a nice chat about stamps and inks and I left knowing I’d be back.

I haven’t had the ability to do some full on card crafting, so I stamped a couple of images in my bullet journal and colored those in with Prismacolors. It helped to do something small just so that I don’t have to stare forlornly at my craft equipment, wishing I could use it. Just doing these two images made me happy and now I see them when I flip back through my notebook.

So, if you don’t have time to do a full on session, take out one stamp, stamp it somewhere and then color it in. Or if you only have coloring books available, pick a page with a lot of small discrete items and color one in then put the pencils away. Sometimes you only need five minutes to get the benefit of doing some crafting.

While I was going through things in an attempt to pare down my collection pre-move, I discovered some old photopolymer stamps that had yellowed (this is normal) and decided to see if I could still use them.

So I tried to peel one off the sheet and it was like pulling a wad of gum off of a wall. It was mostly solid but it started to stretch and wouldn’t return to its original shape. When I tried to lift the other one, it actually ripped down the center of the stamp without even having to pull too hard.

These stamps were about five or six years old. I have rubber stamps that are over 25 years old that I still use and that still print just fine.

I am not saying don’t buy photopolymer stamps. These are wonderful tools that are relatively inexpensive in comparison to rubber and while they don’t last forever they can certainly give you a lot of great impressions over their lives. Just know that you won’t get the decades of use out of them as you would a rubber stamp.

I haven’t posted to my blog in a while because I am having to move from my home in Seattle to San Diego for a variety of reasons, not many of which are good I had to pare down my crafting stash which is just painful as many of you know.

I should be done with the move on Friday. What this means for me and for the blog and YouTube channel is that I’ll have more time to devote to these and will be posting more often and showing off what I’m doing and hopefully giving you ideas for your own projects.